Dostoevsky loses

This multimedia production is based on Dostoevsky's The Idiot, but, if you are thinking that, by going to the National Theatre, you won't have to bother to read the novel, forget it.

If you don't know the story, you are unlikely to be able to follow what is going on.

The hero is in love with two women. Will he marry them or murder them? I don't think that the audience cares - they are so busy watching Katie Mitchell's production.

Mitchell has done brilliant work at the National, most notably in her outstanding versions of Strindberg's Dream Play and Euripides's Iphigenia at Aulis and Women of Troy.

She has also completely ruined Chekhov's The Seagull.

Some Trace Of Her is in the same style as her productions of Martin Crimp's Attempts On Her Life and her adaptation of Virginia Woolf's The Waves.

If you have seen these, you will know exactly what you are in for and you may well feel that, clever and fascinating though it undoubtedly all is, twice is enough.

The actors are their own cameramen and stagehands. They spend as much, perhaps more, time setting up a scene than acting it. They are constantly rushing around the stage, scrambling over cables, moving video-cameras, microphones, projectors, chairs, carpets and props in order to dress the set.

The women have to be constantly getting in and out of their costumes just as the men have to be constantly taking off their shirts and then putting them back on.

What the actors set up is video-filmed and blown up on a large screen behind them. The grainy monochrome fragments have the quality of old Victorian photographs.

Normally, in the theatre, one actor plays many parts. Here, one part is played by many actors and all at the same time.

In order to create the screen images, one actor is used for the voice, another is used for the face and a third is used for the body and they are edited as the audience watches.

The interest is never in the story and the acting but always in the way the actors are achieving the effects. The stage management upstages the narrative every time. Dostoevsky loses out completely.

It might be interesting to see Ben Whishaw in a straight adaptation of The Idiot. He has the right sort of haunted Russian look for the leading role.

Plays until October 21. Box office: (020) 7452-3000.